19 ms·

Linear – A fast issue tracker

491 points by tommoor 6y ago

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I have a rough time understanding why I'd pick this over the issue tracker integrated with my source control. I get that it can sync with GitHub or GitLab (Does it sync the issue text/comments such that GitHub users can comment on the issues? Are the issues on both sides using the same numbering? In this case, is Linear just a GitHub issues client?) but I imagine I am losing out on any given feature that my source control adds for issue integration, at least until Linear also does it. Basically, I feel like you need to sell me a lot more on why I should use Linear over GitHub Issues, and how the benefits outweigh the added complexity of going two places.
- gnud 6y ago
  You don't want your issue tracker in your source control if your product includes multiple source repositories, and a single bug might span several, or need to move between them. Also, if you have customers who file bugs, they don't care about your code structure. And maybe they shouldn't have read access to your code?
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    Fair points.
  - haram_masala 6y ago
    Last I checked, GitHub lets you create projects that span multiple repos. But it’s still a good point that you shouldn’t be mangling your source control system to be a customer-facing support portal.
  - threeseed 6y ago
    You can just create an "issues" or "feedback" repository. Then you get the benefits of first-class integration with your code and CI/CD pipeline.
saagarjha 6y ago
Let me ask the inevitable question: Electron?
- auslegung 6y ago
  It appears so. I found it in their careers section https://linear.app/readme https://linear.app/readme, under Tech.
- jorde 6y ago
  Yes, we're a small team and as we're building Linear for both the web and desktop, it was the obvious choice at least at this stage. It's essentially the same app and experience on both but desktop provides better notifications and faster "in and out" of the app experience - it's important for us that Linear is there when you need it and doesn't get on the way.
tyre 6y ago
We've been using Linear for a couple months. It's kind of like Superhuman in that the primary benefit is hotkeys. Otherwise it is an issue tracker. I think the reason we see a steady stream of new issue trackers is that teams are trying to fix with software what are people problems. New issue trackers feel faster for the same reason switching browsers tends to feel faster—you're getting rid of all of the crap you piled up in the old one. Don't migrate your backlog, start with only a couple engineers in a new issue tracker, and suddenly, wow!, this new tool is so much better! But I don't think it really solves the problem. For most organizations, tracking tickets is a solved (by many products) problem. Starting with a new tool has the appearance of making things better, but leads to the same place. The problem is not the tool, it's the structure of the organization.
- tbrock 6y ago
  I tend to agree but I have a anecdotal counterexample. We recently switched from JIRA to Clubhouse by importing our history and backlog wholesale. Due to the substantial performance bump we have definitively leveled up as a team. Status updates that used to happen in slack channels are now captured in Clubhouse, people log in to check on progress, stories get love and details. JIRA cloud was unusably slow and as a result we didn’t want to use the tool. We hated it even though it technically “worked”.
  - ryanisnan 6y ago
    > JIRA cloud was unusably slow and as a result we didn’t want to use the tool. We hated it even though it technically “worked”. - every JIRA customer ever
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      We're a JIRA customer and we're quite happy. It's not slow, at least to any degree that matters. We're not a huge team, nor do use much more than tickets with FishEye integration though. We also have a self-hosted instance. But for us it has worked quite well, and I have better memories of JIRA than say MantisBT which I used before.
_jordan 6y ago
I've been playing around with this casually for a few weeks and am quite impressed. It's a definite improvement over Jira in simplicity and performance, but is missing quite a few features still. But still, it's my preference. I have started to appreciate light, fast, minimalist interfaces much more over time.
njn 6y ago
It's closed source. [Trac](https://trac.edgewall.org/ https://trac.edgewall.org/) is better.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Because Trac is open source, or because Trac is easier/nicer to use?
- randomchars 6y ago
  In what way? It definitely appears less user friendly, and has the "typical open source look".
- alkonaut 6y ago
  Trac was great 15 years ago, but now Trac is a dinosaur. It would be somewhat redeeming if it was at least fast, but it's mind numbingly slow. Before we eventually ditched Trac we had to buy ever faster hardware but requests could still take 20 seconds. Git support in Trac is an afterthought (It started as svn-trac after all!) so pull request management etc is either missing or handled by plugins (and most trac plugins seem inactive or defunct by now). Trying to get a good mobile experience, slack integration I haven't even tried but I assume it's no picnic.
enra 6y ago
Founder here. Here to answer any questions you might have. We built Linear as we’re frustrated the practices and the available tools when it came to managing software projects. On the product, we especially tackled the performance problem. Everything is synced to the client and we sync just delta packages between the cloud and client as changes happen. This way all actions a happen instantly and navigating around the app is really fast. And the app works offline too. We also streamlined the UI and UX, overall we are rethinking what comes after agile for software development. I think many teams looking for something simple to run their teams. Our announcement post: https://medium.com/linear-app/practices-for-building-linear-is-now-open-for-all-234f7cf9a3d0 https://medium.com/linear-app/practices-for-building-linear-...
- ghayes 6y ago
  We've been using Linear for an 8-person engineering team for the last few months, and I just want to say thank you -- we've really loved it. The well-designed app with hotkeys makes managing tickets and cycles so fast that it doesn't interrupt your concentration to update a ticket and continue working. It's really brought the fun back to engineering management.
  - enra 6y ago
    Awesome to hear! We also think that little annoyances really hurt the team productivity over time. Especially in tools that you use daily.
- ivanfon 6y ago
  Is the desktop app native?
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    No, it’s just electron. I don’t see the benefit over making it a PWA or even just a regular self-hosted web app.
    - 6y ago
NetOpWibby 6y ago
I have an invite to this finally but haven’t been able to delve into it much. Will do so this week.
bachmeier 6y ago
What's the purpose of a restricted "free" plan with a max of 250 issues? There are enough actually free options out there that the free plan doesn't bring anything to the table. Why wouldn't you do a free trial of an unrestricted plan instead? The obvious thing that stands out is that you'd have no way to test their support before paying.
- jorde 6y ago
  We wanted to make the product free for smaller teams to get started without worrying about who to invite. We only count active issue to the limit, and once you're done with them, you can archive them. And yes, we do have support for all users and priority support (faster response times) for paying users. We want to build a long lasting sustainable business and charging for the product is big part of it.
  - cachestash 6y ago
    Just some feedback, but I would consider doing a free tier for open source projects which would get your the coverage and in turn the adoption you need. You need to win developers over who in turn influence tool procurements.
  - bachmeier 6y ago
    Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting you should have a better free plan, I was wondering why you have one at all. Free users are expensive and a hassle and I'm skeptical that you'll acquire a lot of paying customers that way. I can't claim to have any idea about the inner workings of this market, though I've spent a lot of time looking at the options in this space. There are plenty of free options for those without the cash to pay $8/user/month. Your free plan isn't particularly compelling.
    - doppel 6y ago
      I imagine the free plan also doubles as a trial for a paid subscription. Moving issue trackers can be a hassle, so having unlimited time to test out the workflow and features for a small team or project makes good sense, and if you decide to switch it should be easy enough to upgrade.
dsr_ 6y ago
Using any ticket/bug/issue tracker is better than not using one. That said, much of the information you put in one of these is really sensitive, perhaps even confidential and quite often embarrassing if leaked. So. Privacy policy? Extremely generic, and doesn't guarantee you anything. Terms of Service? "We take no responsibility and assume no liability for Content you or any third party posts on or through Service. However, by posting Content using Service you grant us the right and license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content on and through Service. You agree that this license includes the right for us to make your Content available to other users of Service, who may also use your Content subject to these Terms." I don't know about you, but I don't really want the discussion of security-critical bugs in my product to be publicly reproduced and made available to other customers. Maybe fix this, Linear?
- fwip 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure that's bog-standard EULA for "We need to show the tickets you made to other users on your team."
  - dsr_ 6y ago
    But that's not what it says, so it's not appropriate. "We keep the data that you store with us confidential. Our staff will not look at it unless you specifically ask us to investigate a specific issue. Other than legal requirements (e.g. a valid subpoena) we won't share it with anyone unless you've identified them to us as part of your team or otherwise authorized to see your data." You should always say what you mean in contracts.
- jorde 6y ago
  Thanks, we'll be updating our ToS soon and addressing this feedback. We take user privacy and security extremely seriously (many of us worked at Coinbase) and would never expose anything without your consent. I think this clause was for potentially opting into public sharing but it's not something we do.
_jal 6y ago
I was ruined for bug trackers by RT (https://bestpractical.com https://bestpractical.com ). Driving issue tracking from email is brilliant - I only had to look at the application for reference or planning, all the normal back and forth happens from email. (Optionally - you can of course type in a web browser if you prefer.) Jira's email behavior is pointless to the point of being counterproductive, and I disabled it. I have to look at it constantly anyway, why would I want it peeing in my inbox, too? Of course, those who hate email are would react to it differently.
- oftenwrong 6y ago
  RT was great! Once upon a time, I worked in a Perl shop and we had a lot of automation for RT built via scripts that spit out emails.
- trabant00 6y ago
  RT + zero inbox is my best experience with collaboration tools. But for many many years now I am forced to look at jira, mail, teams/slack, and stash/gitlab to understand what people are doing and what's going on with that serious issue that's being passed around and lost in communication :(
ggambetta 6y ago
What a strange state of affairs that in 2020 an USP for an issue tracker is that it is fast. An issue tracker. How did we get here?
- dsr_ 6y ago
  By ignoring RequestTracker.
  - ulkesh 6y ago
    And you use RequestTracker for software development? A simple glance at their website clearly shows to me that it's a tool to manage customer-facing ticketing mainly (allowing integration via email addresses). Linear's purpose is for managing software projects and features/issues within those projects. I'm by no means a Linear advocate, I couldn't care less what people use to manage their software projects. But tools tend to have specific purposes and RT seems quite different from Linear with respect to their distinct purposes.
Hnrobert42 6y ago
Jira is a hot circle of garbage. I am going to check out Linear for my team because I can’t stand how slowly Jira pages load and how long it takes Atlassian to address documented bugs.
- _tbyy 6y ago
  Anyone who makes general complaints about Jira like this a) works in a place where Jira has not been correctly configured or b) works in a place with a terrible internet connection c) works in a place where both a) & b) are true or d) doesn't have any idea what they are talking about. P.S. what exactly is "a hot circle of garbage" other than a mixed metaphor?
  - grk 6y ago
    So cloud hosted Jira is misconfigured?
    - heavenlyblue 6y ago
      I would assume they mean “you have not set up your JIRA workflow according to your needs”
      - regularfry 6y ago
        Which would be a fairly rubbish take, because when it's my workflow, it's MY WORKFLOW. What they might mean is "I have not set up my workflow according to Jira's needs" which is entirely Jira's problem to solve.
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    On-prem JIRA is fast. Cloud-hosted JIRA is slow. It's clear as day that Atlassian throttles the cloud-hosted version.
  - seekingcharlie 6y ago
    I‘m working for 2 companies atm where one uses Jira and one uses Linear. Doing anything in Jira / confluence is really slow. It’s a nightmare to navigate and it seems like every time I click on anything, it takes 2-3 seconds to load. It’s really hard to explain but I guarantee you that if you tried linear out, you’d “get it”.
xwdv 6y ago
Is there any CLI interface?
- knes 6y ago
  we actually build an app to help with our sprint planning on top of their API. You can read about it here >> https://blog.getcensus.com/building-spatial-interface-for-sprint-tracking/ https://blog.getcensus.com/building-spatial-interface-for-sp...
- jorde 6y ago
  Not yet but we had few people hacking on our GraphQL API already so hopefully we'll get there soon. Integrating into your existing workflow is one of the design cornerstones for us, we don't want to waste anyone's time. https://docs.linear.app/API-Webhooks-d7b411ffab7b4a91853d04ad12725e47 https://docs.linear.app/API-Webhooks-d7b411ffab7b4a91853d04a...
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fizixer 6y ago
Oh I'm creating an even better, faster issue tracker. I'm naming it 'deep learning'.
tadruj 6y ago
This is a `vi` of issue trackers. It's the kind of software which, after you use it, you desire whole web would use the same design philosophy.
- jcoustaury 6y ago
  very true
PStamatiou 6y ago
Not the intended purpose but I've been using Linear for a personal project of mine (stocks-related iOS app to learn iOS dev) and it's been so much fun to use compare to the JIRA I use at work all day.
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
All issue trackers can be placed on a spectrum: one end is occupied by very fast and very simple apps, another by complex and flexible ones. Fast ones win in the ease of creation of an issue (just type and hit enter), and generally feel more sexy and attractive, but complex ones can be set up to the exact workflow you need. For example, Google tasks or now-dead service do.com by Salesforce clearly belong to 'easy' end, and software like Redmine to 'complex' (though it can be made to look rather attractive by the use of skins). For us, we're sticking to redmine, because it is good and very extendable by the use of plugins. We've found that ease of use does not cover for the reduced flexibility.
- tyteen4a03 6y ago
  What skins do you use? I've found Redmine's default skin to be too stuck in 2010 for me.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
    We're using Circle theme [1], it's not the most modern out there, but it looks OK with our agile plugin. Abacus and Zenmine are the themes that look most 'modern' to me, but I didn't try them out. [1]: https://www.redmineup.com/pages/themes/circle https://www.redmineup.com/pages/themes/circle
knes 6y ago
been using Linear for 3 months at my new company. Honestly, I don't really see the value over any other tools (Jira, Trello, Asana, Monday, etc). Sure they have a command palette and the UI is pretty fast (like Trello) which is nice but you still need too many clicks/keyboard shortcuts for simple tasks like adding 2+ issues. Their Slack integration is also non existent. You can't create issues based on a conversation for example. So overall, I will keep using it but will probably not evangelized it or bring it with me to another company.
- enra 6y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! We want to add quicker ways to add multiple issues, which can be useful for example when creating a new project. Also you should be able to create issues through slack with /linear or right click the message and hit the "..." menu to create an issue.
olingern 6y ago
It would be neat to have Github, Gitlab, etc. mirrored because I've always seen issue software that doesn't directly integrate with repositories to be more work to manage than not. I make heavy use of the `fixes #` feature on Github to auto-close issues. This adds up over one or two years when you're closing multiple issues per week.
- humanfromearth 6y ago
  Same here, I tried Linear, but the fact that it doesn't use github as the source of truth is a deal breaker for us. I would love something like Reviewable - it uses github as the "DB" and provides a nicer interface for doing code reviews.
  - evaneykelen 6y ago
    I’m working on TaskSift which, although it’s not a pure issue tracker, does use a mix of sources like email, github, etc as its source of truth when it comes to issue status. We struggled quite a bit with getting this status thing right, finally settling for model where user stories inside TaskSift are based on multiple inbound tickets (each with a different status), and where each story can be published eg to GitHub, QA queue, an l10n tool, etc again each with its own status and completion time. Once all published tasks are finished the folks who contributed to the inbound tickets can all be notified, and the tickets can be closed, either from within TS or using the tool in which the ticket was created originally (Zendesk etc).
  - tommoor 6y ago
    > the fact that it doesn't use github as the source of truth is a deal breaker for us. Why is that important? You'd be completely hamstrung by the available GitHub API's and speed.
    - hobofan 6y ago
      > You'd be completely hamstrung by the available GitHub API's and speed. Out of all the APIs I've built similar projects on, GitHub has been among the ones that's the easiest to mirror/cache to your own DB, so I wouldn't say that's really a problem in practice.
amelius 6y ago
Reminds me of Joel Spolsky and his FogBugz tool (and who later started StackOverflow & co). https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/11/08/painless-bug-tracking/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/11/08/painless-bug-track... But cool as it looks, I'm personally reluctant about replacing my locally hosted open source developer tools by pay-per-month SaaS solutions which are closed-source and handle possibly sensitive data of me and my customers.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  Spolsky sold FogBugz a couple years ago. The tool was fine enough for small teams, but it was a mess for larger teams (tons of cases, no good way to organize).
rudolph9 6y ago
I want issue tracking where everything thing is saved to a hit repository. I’ve started using a crude version of this where each open issue is a directory, there is README.md for each issue and supporting files go in the same directory and get relatively linked to in the readme. When an issue is closed you delete the directory. When you need to reopen an issue you revert the commit that deleted the directory. It’s all manual and no UI and works for my personal stuff but it strikes me as odd that there is no widely used issue tracking with a nice UI that tracks all the data in git and git-large-file-store
- the_duke 6y ago
  Check out git-bug [1]. It's a decentralized issue tracker that stores the data in Git and offers a CLI/TUI/web UI. [1] https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug
  - rudolph9 6y ago
    This looks very promising. Thank you!
imdsm 6y ago
Tip: show a demo or screenshots. I'm busy. I looked for 3 seconds and bounced.
- Lightbody 6y ago
  The page is full of screenshots (5+) and there is a clear call to action to sign up and try it out. shrug
beshrkayali 6y ago
Looks a bit broken on Firefox.
- jayp 6y ago
  What parts? Been using it for months on Firefox.
plainOldText 6y ago
I haven’t tried Linear, but while browsing the site I couldn’t help but notice what an exquisite job the designer did with the Linear site. It’s consistent, lightweight, it has pleasant proportions, a nice color theme, etc. It’s also sprinkled with all kinds of little details that show care, attention and craftsmanship. I wish I’d see more sites like this.
- radihuq 6y ago
  Agreed - love the design of the landing page
- jacob_rezi 6y ago
  How was it built? Any clue?
  - prvnsmpth 6y ago
    They've used Next.js
Lightbody 6y ago
We started using Linear a couple weeks ago and overall we're very happy. There is no doubt that @tyre's points about a "reset" being part of the reason folks like new issue trackers. But setting aside the "reset" we got (our backlog from other tools wasn't _that_ big), we really enjoyed the speed and accessibility (ex: desktop app, keyboard shortcuts, etc). I recommend folks give it a try. My only feedback to the Linear team is: I get notifications for the desktop app to upgrade too often. I love rapid iteration, but it feels like it's daily. Because I get it so often, it's caused me to start to not pay attention to the "red dot", which my brain has convinced itself is "update ready" and not "unread items in inbox", which it really is. Hopefully you can find a happy balance or some other UX tricks to help me out here. Thanks!
- enra 6y ago
  Thanks! It's a balance we need to strike, we also looking what would the best way to ask people to upgrade. We have bit too many recently, so we put a hold on new releases for now.
  - pfista 6y ago
    I've also thought about how many updates have been coming through lately. I love the velocity, but not the notification. Maybe there is a less obtrusive way of updating regularly?
dylanpyle 6y ago
We took a bet on Linear fairly early on (moved over last August!) and have been consistently impressed. I've used many different tools in the past (Pivotal Tracker, Jira, Trello, Asana, Github...) and Linear has by far the most polished, productive interface of the bunch. We have fairly strong opinions about our workflow (using points, planning sprints, etc) and have found that even in the cases where Linear isn't as opinionated as we are, or doesn't have granular tools/configuration to manage things, we can get most of the benefits we need by using tags and other features appropriately. I was a die-hard Pivotal Tracker user before this, and it's very hard to imagine going back now. Super impressive product and team, highly recommended!
cw 6y ago
Linear brings me joy every day.
atombender 6y ago
25+ years of working in software engineering has taught me that "issue tracker" presents the wrong metaphor. This product looks like it's not providing any novel improvements on what has failed for everyone so far, other than a slightly shinier surface. Clearly there's utility to issue tracking: Projects have problems of various kinds (bugs, mostly) that need to be fixed. Sometimes these are conflated with tasks, which are things that people need to do, but those are not the same. Sometimes these are also conflated with "support tickets" from consumers/customers. The problem isn't having a "database of problems". Clearly that's useful: If I use a program, and it doesn't work in some way, being able to look this information up somewhere is useful, both as a way to confirm that the problem exists for other people, and to follow up on it, and as a way to potentially find an existing solution. But issue trackers aren't mostly used for that. They're used to drive development, and in that sense, this model doesn't accurately represent the fundamental relationships and power dynamics between people and technology. Issue trackers rot and become unusable piles of cruft very quickly because they're just "databases", and not a process. Databases must be maintained; they model real-life information that becomes out of date almost the moment it's entered. Of course, an organization can use issue trackers successfully, but it requires a very rigid process that constantly follows up, and you end up with a top-heavy social process that mostly (ab)uses a database to keep notes about progress. I'm a fan of action-oriented task management, based on the principle that if something isn't painful (poses a roadblock to development, for example) or risky (may cause a customer to leave, for example), then it's not worth entering into a centralized database. Project-level task management should be oriented around stakeholders: Whoever an issue is important to should own it and keep it alive. For example, a project manager can keep a spreadsheet or whatever of what people are working on, and their job is assigning work and making sure things get done, that the work follows some development timeline, and that the upstream stakeholders are satisfied. Nobody downstream needs to see this spreadsheet, but the project manager may need to present it upstream. By doing this, you're essentially rate-limiting your issue/task flow, and ensuring that someone keeps what's important alive. If something slips through the cracks and nobody complains, it wasn't important enough to remember. A simple document (Google Docs, a wiki, markdown files on Github, etc.) of "known issues" can be used by developers and certain customers/clients to understand deficiencies. It's going to grow stale fast anyway, so prepare for it. Keep it loose and let it rot, and use it as a springboard for ideas in the future (if you bother to ever look at it again). Whenever possible, describe known issues in code so that you can look for TODO comments; that way, they won't go out of sync so easily. For clients of your project/product, have a support channel ("ticket system"). This is not a database, but a communication tool. Open tickets mean there's a stakeholder waiting at the other end that may not be serviced fully (even if your project doesn't have a formal SLA). Making it public allows people to discover existing problems and find solutions to problems people had in the past. Support channels shouldn't just be for external clients. I think a lot of companies could improve their communications by having internal ones, too. I think a lot of people understand this, yet it feels liberating to put their backlog in a database, because it seems like something that's ideal for a database. Developers love building task systems; it's such a simple data model that seems to neatly organize real-life concerns. But it's also a model that doesn't scale to more than a handful of issues, and doesn't really match how people work and communicate. At the same time, it may feel risky to forego an issue tracker. But there are plenty of large projects that are managed without one. PostgreSQL, for example, doesn't have an issue tracker, and bugs are managed entirely through mailing list discussions, and they're doing great.
tylergetsay 6y ago
We've been a paying customer for a month and enjoy linear a lot. I tried a ton of other trackers, my second favorite being Notion. Reason we left Notion was lack of an API. Even though it lacks some basic features, a graphQL API that means I'll never be missing an endpoint and webhooks keep me happy. For example, I have a step in CI to move issues from staged to deployed. Also then moves associated hubspot to tickets to a queue for CS to inform the customer.
madrox 6y ago
This may be a minority opinion, but I'm disappointed that so many core workflow apps like ticketing still living in the browser. Any serious programmer would scoff at the idea at their main IDE being within a browser, so why is it acceptable for a ticketing system, which is nearly as core to our workflows?
- novok 6y ago
  Ironic thing to say, since for many, their IDE is visual studio code, an electron app.
- arcticfox 6y ago
  > Any serious programmer would scoff at the idea at their main IDE being within a browser Are you talking about just the browser chrome or the actual implementation? Because maybe it means that I'm not a serious programmer, but I love VS Code. The filesystem access issues make IDEs a bit different than issue trackers IMO, I don't have a problem with an issue tracker living in a browser, or being browser + Electron options.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  There's no advantage to native-based issue trackers.
- haram_masala 6y ago
  Many issue trackers have APIs that let you use them from within IDEs, and often in quite powerful ways. JetBrains does this nicely with trackers like JIRA and the native one in GitHub.
- enra 6y ago
  We recommend people to install the desktop app so it's easy to keep open. However, people still like the ability to easily link to issues, even if they don't have the app installed, hence the web browser support.
hknd 6y ago
Finally a simple issue tracker - I was waiting for something like this for ages.
jayp 6y ago
Been using Linear everyday for the past few months and love it. For many that may find it interesting, here is a recent conversation I had with Linear co-founder Tuomas Artman about how they iterated by listening to their users: https://www.heraldhq.com/userstand/how-linear-leverages-their-user-community-to-dig-into-customer-problems https://www.heraldhq.com/userstand/how-linear-leverages-thei...
robjbye 6y ago
We've been trialling Linear on one of our project teams for the last 3 months (used to use Jira), and it's sped up workflows for product managers drastically. Simple tasks like duplicating and reassigning tickets can take 75% less time. Day to day I've found myself going from 2+ hours in Jira a day, to <1hr in Linear a day. This makes a huge difference as product management shouldn't be about managing tickets, it should be able launching features the better your product and help users. Plus I actually love jumping into Linear to catch up on things, whereas Jira genuinely Brough anxiety. Happy to answer any questions people may have.
amelius 6y ago
They should open up their own issue tracker for public viewing, so that (1) you see how many issues they have, and (2) you get a feel for what the end-user sees when they use the tool.
the_arun 6y ago
I still miss Bugzilla - which was relatively fast. Thought modern js libraries make parallel API calls and make it look fast. But JIRA is too slow and becomes slower with number of tickets and users. Any day, I would prefer speed over nice user interface.
sangupta 6y ago
I am usually keen to try new tools. However, with the limit of 250 active issues and hassles to archive old ones, not many open source projects will be able to use it. On the other hand, I can't recommend it in my BU/company unless I have evaluated it for full extent. Consider, providing a free-tier for open source projects.
ussrlongbow 6y ago
No self-hosted option? Passing this one.
wufufufu 6y ago
I'm interested in a native (MacOS optimized) issue tracker client and then a dictation software that is adept at understanding software terms. I've watched my doctor friend dictate to his laptop without a microphone and it took down notes perfectly.
qwerty456127 6y ago
All I ever wanted of an issue tracker is a HN-like comments tree.
ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
I don’t see the value add. I work at a place with 1000+people using Jira. No one complains about the performance. There’s really nothing here I can make a case to the managers about. It does look nice but thats not enough. I think there’s room for an opinionated issue tracker, Jira is like everything and the kitchen sink and people make their own rules.
- erichurkman 6y ago
  There are already a number of opinionated issue trackers, like Clubhouse and Pivotal Tracker.
  - ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
    Yeah you’re right. Well then there’s no more room for issue trackers. Definitely not at the higher levels
iamjaredwalters 6y ago
I've been interested in using Linear but I don't understand the workflow. Do branches have to use the linear issue slug, for example? Is that the keystone of the workflow? I've looked all over for examples of usage to no avail and the Linear website mentions nothing in the way of docs or onboarding.
whichquestion 6y ago
I found the app to be gorgeous and well designed. Very smooth. I would go as far as considering this over JIRA. Only thing I’m not really keen on is the sign in with the google account. I’d rather pay to have an account than have to sign up with google. Sign in with regular email doesn’t really work either, because it never gives you a way to create a password, it just sends a code to your email. If I want to login from a different computer with same email, I can’t unless I sign in with a google account.
voz_ 6y ago
One of the founders of this thing was my first EM at Uber. He was (and is) a very strong engineer, and a great overall guy. Huge kudos, and I wish him the best success. If you wanna put your money in a company started by decidedly not-scumbags, this is the place.
ing33k 6y ago
I just signed up and started using it. Cannot really give a review about it,but the UI is really good. Would like to know the tech stack behind it.
tomaskafka 6y ago
App? Okay ... wait, does that mean no tabs (= instantly accessible working set)? Nononononono! :)
gorgoiler 6y ago
It’s good to see the command palette pattern gain adoption. I’ve introduced a few people now to command-space in macOS and they’ve all loved it. Why hunt for an icon when you can just type “TextEdit”? Maybe a future macOS will allow apps to hook into the spotlight search bar and present their command palettes there, in a standard way?
stunt 6y ago
Atlassian seems to be one of the slowest software companies. They haven't done much to improve their products in all these years. Everything they have is ready to be overtaken by a disruptive product.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  Assuming you're correct, I wonder what caused A to slowly change and become slow like that? From previously having been a bit innovative? E.g. the many seconds long load times sounds very unexpected ... How did A change so it now accepts things like that? (Or was it always so -- but we were using Jira 5-6 years ago, don't remember having thought of it as slow)
stunt 6y ago
I saw many successful examples of teams with super simple boards. Most of them only with built-in Gitlab/Github issue trackers. When the tooling provides too many options, you will start adding complexity to your workflow without considering real benefits.
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neop1x 6y ago
Product name Linear doesn't seem to be the best choice to me. Google search (correctly) gives linear algebra results.
thinkmassive 6y ago
Wow, multiple mentions of open source in the comments, even a mention of Trac, but no mentions of Phabricator yet? It's the most modern and effective open source issue tracker I've seen so far, definitely worth a look if you value FOSS. https://www.phacility.com/ https://www.phacility.com/
k_bx 6y ago
I'd like to mention one less orthodox solution to a problem of managing issues: a little tool called github-agent I wrote https://github.com/k-bx/github-agent https://github.com/k-bx/github-agent It lets you sync your issues as a git directory of markdown files which you can edit with your favorite Emacs/Vim/Whatever editor. This way it's possible to not get yourself into a "tracker hell", having big and very verbose issues with checklists in them. There are many possible improvements to the tool, it's pretty much MVP and PRs are welcome, but it's already been an amazing helper, esp for my teams that work remotely.
smcleod 6y ago
Just seems to load an empty blank black page in Safari on iOS 13.5.1.
jbaber 6y ago
Still alpha, but I've been enjoying [git-bug](https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug).
pandesal 6y ago
Wow. What a very diverse set of founders
einpoklum 6y ago
It may be fast, but it's not free software. Too bad. ... also, the UI seems to be a lot of white-space and faded colors. That's another negative sign for me.

491 points by tommoor 6y ago

I have a rough time understanding why I'd pick this over the issue tracker integrated with my source control. I get that it can sync with GitHub or GitLab (Does it sync the issue text/comments such that GitHub users can comment on the issues? Are the issues on both sides using the same numbering? In this case, is Linear just a GitHub issues client?) but I imagine I am losing out on any given feature that my source control adds for issue integration, at least until Linear also does it. Basically, I feel like you need to sell me a lot more on why I should use Linear over GitHub Issues, and how the benefits outweigh the added complexity of going two places.

gnud 6y ago
You don't want your issue tracker in your source control if your product includes multiple source repositories, and a single bug might span several, or need to move between them. Also, if you have customers who file bugs, they don't care about your code structure. And maybe they shouldn't have read access to your code?
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Fair points.
- haram_masala 6y ago
  Last I checked, GitHub lets you create projects that span multiple repos. But it’s still a good point that you shouldn’t be mangling your source control system to be a customer-facing support portal.
- threeseed 6y ago
  You can just create an "issues" or "feedback" repository. Then you get the benefits of first-class integration with your code and CI/CD pipeline.

saagarjha 6y ago

Let me ask the inevitable question: Electron?

auslegung 6y ago
It appears so. I found it in their careers section https://linear.app/readme https://linear.app/readme, under Tech.
jorde 6y ago
Yes, we're a small team and as we're building Linear for both the web and desktop, it was the obvious choice at least at this stage. It's essentially the same app and experience on both but desktop provides better notifications and faster "in and out" of the app experience - it's important for us that Linear is there when you need it and doesn't get on the way.

tyre 6y ago

We've been using Linear for a couple months. It's kind of like Superhuman in that the primary benefit is hotkeys. Otherwise it is an issue tracker. I think the reason we see a steady stream of new issue trackers is that teams are trying to fix with software what are people problems. New issue trackers feel faster for the same reason switching browsers tends to feel faster—you're getting rid of all of the crap you piled up in the old one. Don't migrate your backlog, start with only a couple engineers in a new issue tracker, and suddenly, wow!, this new tool is so much better! But I don't think it really solves the problem. For most organizations, tracking tickets is a solved (by many products) problem. Starting with a new tool has the appearance of making things better, but leads to the same place. The problem is not the tool, it's the structure of the organization.

tbrock 6y ago
I tend to agree but I have a anecdotal counterexample. We recently switched from JIRA to Clubhouse by importing our history and backlog wholesale. Due to the substantial performance bump we have definitively leveled up as a team. Status updates that used to happen in slack channels are now captured in Clubhouse, people log in to check on progress, stories get love and details. JIRA cloud was unusably slow and as a result we didn’t want to use the tool. We hated it even though it technically “worked”.
- ryanisnan 6y ago
  > JIRA cloud was unusably slow and as a result we didn’t want to use the tool. We hated it even though it technically “worked”. - every JIRA customer ever
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    We're a JIRA customer and we're quite happy. It's not slow, at least to any degree that matters. We're not a huge team, nor do use much more than tickets with FishEye integration though. We also have a self-hosted instance. But for us it has worked quite well, and I have better memories of JIRA than say MantisBT which I used before.

_jordan 6y ago

I've been playing around with this casually for a few weeks and am quite impressed. It's a definite improvement over Jira in simplicity and performance, but is missing quite a few features still. But still, it's my preference. I have started to appreciate light, fast, minimalist interfaces much more over time.

njn 6y ago

It's closed source. [Trac](https://trac.edgewall.org/ https://trac.edgewall.org/) is better.

saagarjha 6y ago
Because Trac is open source, or because Trac is easier/nicer to use?
randomchars 6y ago
In what way? It definitely appears less user friendly, and has the "typical open source look".
alkonaut 6y ago
Trac was great 15 years ago, but now Trac is a dinosaur. It would be somewhat redeeming if it was at least fast, but it's mind numbingly slow. Before we eventually ditched Trac we had to buy ever faster hardware but requests could still take 20 seconds. Git support in Trac is an afterthought (It started as svn-trac after all!) so pull request management etc is either missing or handled by plugins (and most trac plugins seem inactive or defunct by now). Trying to get a good mobile experience, slack integration I haven't even tried but I assume it's no picnic.

enra 6y ago

Founder here. Here to answer any questions you might have. We built Linear as we’re frustrated the practices and the available tools when it came to managing software projects. On the product, we especially tackled the performance problem. Everything is synced to the client and we sync just delta packages between the cloud and client as changes happen. This way all actions a happen instantly and navigating around the app is really fast. And the app works offline too. We also streamlined the UI and UX, overall we are rethinking what comes after agile for software development. I think many teams looking for something simple to run their teams. Our announcement post: https://medium.com/linear-app/practices-for-building-linear-is-now-open-for-all-234f7cf9a3d0 https://medium.com/linear-app/practices-for-building-linear-...

ghayes 6y ago
We've been using Linear for an 8-person engineering team for the last few months, and I just want to say thank you -- we've really loved it. The well-designed app with hotkeys makes managing tickets and cycles so fast that it doesn't interrupt your concentration to update a ticket and continue working. It's really brought the fun back to engineering management.
- enra 6y ago
  Awesome to hear! We also think that little annoyances really hurt the team productivity over time. Especially in tools that you use daily.
ivanfon 6y ago
Is the desktop app native?
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  No, it’s just electron. I don’t see the benefit over making it a PWA or even just a regular self-hosted web app.
  - 6y ago

NetOpWibby 6y ago

I have an invite to this finally but haven’t been able to delve into it much. Will do so this week.

bachmeier 6y ago

What's the purpose of a restricted "free" plan with a max of 250 issues? There are enough actually free options out there that the free plan doesn't bring anything to the table. Why wouldn't you do a free trial of an unrestricted plan instead? The obvious thing that stands out is that you'd have no way to test their support before paying.

jorde 6y ago
We wanted to make the product free for smaller teams to get started without worrying about who to invite. We only count active issue to the limit, and once you're done with them, you can archive them. And yes, we do have support for all users and priority support (faster response times) for paying users. We want to build a long lasting sustainable business and charging for the product is big part of it.
- cachestash 6y ago
  Just some feedback, but I would consider doing a free tier for open source projects which would get your the coverage and in turn the adoption you need. You need to win developers over who in turn influence tool procurements.
- bachmeier 6y ago
  Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting you should have a better free plan, I was wondering why you have one at all. Free users are expensive and a hassle and I'm skeptical that you'll acquire a lot of paying customers that way. I can't claim to have any idea about the inner workings of this market, though I've spent a lot of time looking at the options in this space. There are plenty of free options for those without the cash to pay $8/user/month. Your free plan isn't particularly compelling.
  - doppel 6y ago
    I imagine the free plan also doubles as a trial for a paid subscription. Moving issue trackers can be a hassle, so having unlimited time to test out the workflow and features for a small team or project makes good sense, and if you decide to switch it should be easy enough to upgrade.

dsr_ 6y ago

Using any ticket/bug/issue tracker is better than not using one. That said, much of the information you put in one of these is really sensitive, perhaps even confidential and quite often embarrassing if leaked. So. Privacy policy? Extremely generic, and doesn't guarantee you anything. Terms of Service? "We take no responsibility and assume no liability for Content you or any third party posts on or through Service. However, by posting Content using Service you grant us the right and license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content on and through Service. You agree that this license includes the right for us to make your Content available to other users of Service, who may also use your Content subject to these Terms." I don't know about you, but I don't really want the discussion of security-critical bugs in my product to be publicly reproduced and made available to other customers. Maybe fix this, Linear?

fwip 6y ago
I'm pretty sure that's bog-standard EULA for "We need to show the tickets you made to other users on your team."
- dsr_ 6y ago
  But that's not what it says, so it's not appropriate. "We keep the data that you store with us confidential. Our staff will not look at it unless you specifically ask us to investigate a specific issue. Other than legal requirements (e.g. a valid subpoena) we won't share it with anyone unless you've identified them to us as part of your team or otherwise authorized to see your data." You should always say what you mean in contracts.
jorde 6y ago
Thanks, we'll be updating our ToS soon and addressing this feedback. We take user privacy and security extremely seriously (many of us worked at Coinbase) and would never expose anything without your consent. I think this clause was for potentially opting into public sharing but it's not something we do.

_jal 6y ago

I was ruined for bug trackers by RT (https://bestpractical.com https://bestpractical.com ). Driving issue tracking from email is brilliant - I only had to look at the application for reference or planning, all the normal back and forth happens from email. (Optionally - you can of course type in a web browser if you prefer.) Jira's email behavior is pointless to the point of being counterproductive, and I disabled it. I have to look at it constantly anyway, why would I want it peeing in my inbox, too? Of course, those who hate email are would react to it differently.

oftenwrong 6y ago
RT was great! Once upon a time, I worked in a Perl shop and we had a lot of automation for RT built via scripts that spit out emails.
trabant00 6y ago
RT + zero inbox is my best experience with collaboration tools. But for many many years now I am forced to look at jira, mail, teams/slack, and stash/gitlab to understand what people are doing and what's going on with that serious issue that's being passed around and lost in communication :(

ggambetta 6y ago

What a strange state of affairs that in 2020 an USP for an issue tracker is that it is fast. An issue tracker. How did we get here?

dsr_ 6y ago
By ignoring RequestTracker.
- ulkesh 6y ago
  And you use RequestTracker for software development? A simple glance at their website clearly shows to me that it's a tool to manage customer-facing ticketing mainly (allowing integration via email addresses). Linear's purpose is for managing software projects and features/issues within those projects. I'm by no means a Linear advocate, I couldn't care less what people use to manage their software projects. But tools tend to have specific purposes and RT seems quite different from Linear with respect to their distinct purposes.

Hnrobert42 6y ago

Jira is a hot circle of garbage. I am going to check out Linear for my team because I can’t stand how slowly Jira pages load and how long it takes Atlassian to address documented bugs.

_tbyy 6y ago
Anyone who makes general complaints about Jira like this a) works in a place where Jira has not been correctly configured or b) works in a place with a terrible internet connection c) works in a place where both a) & b) are true or d) doesn't have any idea what they are talking about. P.S. what exactly is "a hot circle of garbage" other than a mixed metaphor?
- grk 6y ago
  So cloud hosted Jira is misconfigured?
  - heavenlyblue 6y ago
    I would assume they mean “you have not set up your JIRA workflow according to your needs”
    - regularfry 6y ago
      Which would be a fairly rubbish take, because when it's my workflow, it's MY WORKFLOW. What they might mean is "I have not set up my workflow according to Jira's needs" which is entirely Jira's problem to solve.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  On-prem JIRA is fast. Cloud-hosted JIRA is slow. It's clear as day that Atlassian throttles the cloud-hosted version.
- seekingcharlie 6y ago
  I‘m working for 2 companies atm where one uses Jira and one uses Linear. Doing anything in Jira / confluence is really slow. It’s a nightmare to navigate and it seems like every time I click on anything, it takes 2-3 seconds to load. It’s really hard to explain but I guarantee you that if you tried linear out, you’d “get it”.

xwdv 6y ago

Is there any CLI interface?

knes 6y ago
we actually build an app to help with our sprint planning on top of their API. You can read about it here >> https://blog.getcensus.com/building-spatial-interface-for-sprint-tracking/ https://blog.getcensus.com/building-spatial-interface-for-sp...
jorde 6y ago
Not yet but we had few people hacking on our GraphQL API already so hopefully we'll get there soon. Integrating into your existing workflow is one of the design cornerstones for us, we don't want to waste anyone's time. https://docs.linear.app/API-Webhooks-d7b411ffab7b4a91853d04ad12725e47 https://docs.linear.app/API-Webhooks-d7b411ffab7b4a91853d04a...

deleted 6y ago

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fizixer 6y ago

Oh I'm creating an even better, faster issue tracker. I'm naming it 'deep learning'.

tadruj 6y ago

This is a `vi` of issue trackers. It's the kind of software which, after you use it, you desire whole web would use the same design philosophy.

jcoustaury 6y ago
very true

PStamatiou 6y ago

Not the intended purpose but I've been using Linear for a personal project of mine (stocks-related iOS app to learn iOS dev) and it's been so much fun to use compare to the JIRA I use at work all day.

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

All issue trackers can be placed on a spectrum: one end is occupied by very fast and very simple apps, another by complex and flexible ones. Fast ones win in the ease of creation of an issue (just type and hit enter), and generally feel more sexy and attractive, but complex ones can be set up to the exact workflow you need. For example, Google tasks or now-dead service do.com by Salesforce clearly belong to 'easy' end, and software like Redmine to 'complex' (though it can be made to look rather attractive by the use of skins). For us, we're sticking to redmine, because it is good and very extendable by the use of plugins. We've found that ease of use does not cover for the reduced flexibility.

tyteen4a03 6y ago
What skins do you use? I've found Redmine's default skin to be too stuck in 2010 for me.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  We're using Circle theme [1], it's not the most modern out there, but it looks OK with our agile plugin. Abacus and Zenmine are the themes that look most 'modern' to me, but I didn't try them out. [1]: https://www.redmineup.com/pages/themes/circle https://www.redmineup.com/pages/themes/circle

knes 6y ago

been using Linear for 3 months at my new company. Honestly, I don't really see the value over any other tools (Jira, Trello, Asana, Monday, etc). Sure they have a command palette and the UI is pretty fast (like Trello) which is nice but you still need too many clicks/keyboard shortcuts for simple tasks like adding 2+ issues. Their Slack integration is also non existent. You can't create issues based on a conversation for example. So overall, I will keep using it but will probably not evangelized it or bring it with me to another company.

enra 6y ago
Thanks for the feedback! We want to add quicker ways to add multiple issues, which can be useful for example when creating a new project. Also you should be able to create issues through slack with /linear or right click the message and hit the "..." menu to create an issue.

olingern 6y ago

It would be neat to have Github, Gitlab, etc. mirrored because I've always seen issue software that doesn't directly integrate with repositories to be more work to manage than not. I make heavy use of the `fixes #` feature on Github to auto-close issues. This adds up over one or two years when you're closing multiple issues per week.

humanfromearth 6y ago
Same here, I tried Linear, but the fact that it doesn't use github as the source of truth is a deal breaker for us. I would love something like Reviewable - it uses github as the "DB" and provides a nicer interface for doing code reviews.
- evaneykelen 6y ago
  I’m working on TaskSift which, although it’s not a pure issue tracker, does use a mix of sources like email, github, etc as its source of truth when it comes to issue status. We struggled quite a bit with getting this status thing right, finally settling for model where user stories inside TaskSift are based on multiple inbound tickets (each with a different status), and where each story can be published eg to GitHub, QA queue, an l10n tool, etc again each with its own status and completion time. Once all published tasks are finished the folks who contributed to the inbound tickets can all be notified, and the tickets can be closed, either from within TS or using the tool in which the ticket was created originally (Zendesk etc).
- tommoor 6y ago
  > the fact that it doesn't use github as the source of truth is a deal breaker for us. Why is that important? You'd be completely hamstrung by the available GitHub API's and speed.
  - hobofan 6y ago
    > You'd be completely hamstrung by the available GitHub API's and speed. Out of all the APIs I've built similar projects on, GitHub has been among the ones that's the easiest to mirror/cache to your own DB, so I wouldn't say that's really a problem in practice.

amelius 6y ago

Reminds me of Joel Spolsky and his FogBugz tool (and who later started StackOverflow & co). https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/11/08/painless-bug-tracking/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/11/08/painless-bug-track... But cool as it looks, I'm personally reluctant about replacing my locally hosted open source developer tools by pay-per-month SaaS solutions which are closed-source and handle possibly sensitive data of me and my customers.

macspoofing 6y ago
Spolsky sold FogBugz a couple years ago. The tool was fine enough for small teams, but it was a mess for larger teams (tons of cases, no good way to organize).

rudolph9 6y ago

I want issue tracking where everything thing is saved to a hit repository. I’ve started using a crude version of this where each open issue is a directory, there is README.md for each issue and supporting files go in the same directory and get relatively linked to in the readme. When an issue is closed you delete the directory. When you need to reopen an issue you revert the commit that deleted the directory. It’s all manual and no UI and works for my personal stuff but it strikes me as odd that there is no widely used issue tracking with a nice UI that tracks all the data in git and git-large-file-store

the_duke 6y ago
Check out git-bug [1]. It's a decentralized issue tracker that stores the data in Git and offers a CLI/TUI/web UI. [1] https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug
- rudolph9 6y ago
  This looks very promising. Thank you!

imdsm 6y ago

Tip: show a demo or screenshots. I'm busy. I looked for 3 seconds and bounced.

Lightbody 6y ago
The page is full of screenshots (5+) and there is a clear call to action to sign up and try it out. shrug

beshrkayali 6y ago

Looks a bit broken on Firefox.

jayp 6y ago
What parts? Been using it for months on Firefox.

plainOldText 6y ago

I haven’t tried Linear, but while browsing the site I couldn’t help but notice what an exquisite job the designer did with the Linear site. It’s consistent, lightweight, it has pleasant proportions, a nice color theme, etc. It’s also sprinkled with all kinds of little details that show care, attention and craftsmanship. I wish I’d see more sites like this.

radihuq 6y ago
Agreed - love the design of the landing page
jacob_rezi 6y ago
How was it built? Any clue?
- prvnsmpth 6y ago
  They've used Next.js

Lightbody 6y ago

We started using Linear a couple weeks ago and overall we're very happy. There is no doubt that @tyre's points about a "reset" being part of the reason folks like new issue trackers. But setting aside the "reset" we got (our backlog from other tools wasn't _that_ big), we really enjoyed the speed and accessibility (ex: desktop app, keyboard shortcuts, etc). I recommend folks give it a try. My only feedback to the Linear team is: I get notifications for the desktop app to upgrade too often. I love rapid iteration, but it feels like it's daily. Because I get it so often, it's caused me to start to not pay attention to the "red dot", which my brain has convinced itself is "update ready" and not "unread items in inbox", which it really is. Hopefully you can find a happy balance or some other UX tricks to help me out here. Thanks!

enra 6y ago
Thanks! It's a balance we need to strike, we also looking what would the best way to ask people to upgrade. We have bit too many recently, so we put a hold on new releases for now.
- pfista 6y ago
  I've also thought about how many updates have been coming through lately. I love the velocity, but not the notification. Maybe there is a less obtrusive way of updating regularly?

dylanpyle 6y ago

We took a bet on Linear fairly early on (moved over last August!) and have been consistently impressed. I've used many different tools in the past (Pivotal Tracker, Jira, Trello, Asana, Github...) and Linear has by far the most polished, productive interface of the bunch. We have fairly strong opinions about our workflow (using points, planning sprints, etc) and have found that even in the cases where Linear isn't as opinionated as we are, or doesn't have granular tools/configuration to manage things, we can get most of the benefits we need by using tags and other features appropriately. I was a die-hard Pivotal Tracker user before this, and it's very hard to imagine going back now. Super impressive product and team, highly recommended!

cw 6y ago

Linear brings me joy every day.

atombender 6y ago

25+ years of working in software engineering has taught me that "issue tracker" presents the wrong metaphor. This product looks like it's not providing any novel improvements on what has failed for everyone so far, other than a slightly shinier surface. Clearly there's utility to issue tracking: Projects have problems of various kinds (bugs, mostly) that need to be fixed. Sometimes these are conflated with tasks, which are things that people need to do, but those are not the same. Sometimes these are also conflated with "support tickets" from consumers/customers. The problem isn't having a "database of problems". Clearly that's useful: If I use a program, and it doesn't work in some way, being able to look this information up somewhere is useful, both as a way to confirm that the problem exists for other people, and to follow up on it, and as a way to potentially find an existing solution. But issue trackers aren't mostly used for that. They're used to drive development, and in that sense, this model doesn't accurately represent the fundamental relationships and power dynamics between people and technology. Issue trackers rot and become unusable piles of cruft very quickly because they're just "databases", and not a process. Databases must be maintained; they model real-life information that becomes out of date almost the moment it's entered. Of course, an organization can use issue trackers successfully, but it requires a very rigid process that constantly follows up, and you end up with a top-heavy social process that mostly (ab)uses a database to keep notes about progress. I'm a fan of action-oriented task management, based on the principle that if something isn't painful (poses a roadblock to development, for example) or risky (may cause a customer to leave, for example), then it's not worth entering into a centralized database. Project-level task management should be oriented around stakeholders: Whoever an issue is important to should own it and keep it alive. For example, a project manager can keep a spreadsheet or whatever of what people are working on, and their job is assigning work and making sure things get done, that the work follows some development timeline, and that the upstream stakeholders are satisfied. Nobody downstream needs to see this spreadsheet, but the project manager may need to present it upstream. By doing this, you're essentially rate-limiting your issue/task flow, and ensuring that someone keeps what's important alive. If something slips through the cracks and nobody complains, it wasn't important enough to remember. A simple document (Google Docs, a wiki, markdown files on Github, etc.) of "known issues" can be used by developers and certain customers/clients to understand deficiencies. It's going to grow stale fast anyway, so prepare for it. Keep it loose and let it rot, and use it as a springboard for ideas in the future (if you bother to ever look at it again). Whenever possible, describe known issues in code so that you can look for TODO comments; that way, they won't go out of sync so easily. For clients of your project/product, have a support channel ("ticket system"). This is not a database, but a communication tool. Open tickets mean there's a stakeholder waiting at the other end that may not be serviced fully (even if your project doesn't have a formal SLA). Making it public allows people to discover existing problems and find solutions to problems people had in the past. Support channels shouldn't just be for external clients. I think a lot of companies could improve their communications by having internal ones, too. I think a lot of people understand this, yet it feels liberating to put their backlog in a database, because it seems like something that's ideal for a database. Developers love building task systems; it's such a simple data model that seems to neatly organize real-life concerns. But it's also a model that doesn't scale to more than a handful of issues, and doesn't really match how people work and communicate. At the same time, it may feel risky to forego an issue tracker. But there are plenty of large projects that are managed without one. PostgreSQL, for example, doesn't have an issue tracker, and bugs are managed entirely through mailing list discussions, and they're doing great.

tylergetsay 6y ago

We've been a paying customer for a month and enjoy linear a lot. I tried a ton of other trackers, my second favorite being Notion. Reason we left Notion was lack of an API. Even though it lacks some basic features, a graphQL API that means I'll never be missing an endpoint and webhooks keep me happy. For example, I have a step in CI to move issues from staged to deployed. Also then moves associated hubspot to tickets to a queue for CS to inform the customer.

madrox 6y ago

This may be a minority opinion, but I'm disappointed that so many core workflow apps like ticketing still living in the browser. Any serious programmer would scoff at the idea at their main IDE being within a browser, so why is it acceptable for a ticketing system, which is nearly as core to our workflows?

novok 6y ago
Ironic thing to say, since for many, their IDE is visual studio code, an electron app.
arcticfox 6y ago
> Any serious programmer would scoff at the idea at their main IDE being within a browser Are you talking about just the browser chrome or the actual implementation? Because maybe it means that I'm not a serious programmer, but I love VS Code. The filesystem access issues make IDEs a bit different than issue trackers IMO, I don't have a problem with an issue tracker living in a browser, or being browser + Electron options.
macspoofing 6y ago
There's no advantage to native-based issue trackers.
haram_masala 6y ago
Many issue trackers have APIs that let you use them from within IDEs, and often in quite powerful ways. JetBrains does this nicely with trackers like JIRA and the native one in GitHub.
enra 6y ago
We recommend people to install the desktop app so it's easy to keep open. However, people still like the ability to easily link to issues, even if they don't have the app installed, hence the web browser support.

hknd 6y ago

Finally a simple issue tracker - I was waiting for something like this for ages.

jayp 6y ago

Been using Linear everyday for the past few months and love it. For many that may find it interesting, here is a recent conversation I had with Linear co-founder Tuomas Artman about how they iterated by listening to their users: https://www.heraldhq.com/userstand/how-linear-leverages-their-user-community-to-dig-into-customer-problems https://www.heraldhq.com/userstand/how-linear-leverages-thei...

robjbye 6y ago

We've been trialling Linear on one of our project teams for the last 3 months (used to use Jira), and it's sped up workflows for product managers drastically. Simple tasks like duplicating and reassigning tickets can take 75% less time. Day to day I've found myself going from 2+ hours in Jira a day, to <1hr in Linear a day. This makes a huge difference as product management shouldn't be about managing tickets, it should be able launching features the better your product and help users. Plus I actually love jumping into Linear to catch up on things, whereas Jira genuinely Brough anxiety. Happy to answer any questions people may have.

amelius 6y ago

They should open up their own issue tracker for public viewing, so that (1) you see how many issues they have, and (2) you get a feel for what the end-user sees when they use the tool.

the_arun 6y ago

I still miss Bugzilla - which was relatively fast. Thought modern js libraries make parallel API calls and make it look fast. But JIRA is too slow and becomes slower with number of tickets and users. Any day, I would prefer speed over nice user interface.

sangupta 6y ago

I am usually keen to try new tools. However, with the limit of 250 active issues and hassles to archive old ones, not many open source projects will be able to use it. On the other hand, I can't recommend it in my BU/company unless I have evaluated it for full extent. Consider, providing a free-tier for open source projects.

ussrlongbow 6y ago

No self-hosted option? Passing this one.

wufufufu 6y ago

I'm interested in a native (MacOS optimized) issue tracker client and then a dictation software that is adept at understanding software terms. I've watched my doctor friend dictate to his laptop without a microphone and it took down notes perfectly.

qwerty456127 6y ago

All I ever wanted of an issue tracker is a HN-like comments tree.

ulisesrmzroche 6y ago

I don’t see the value add. I work at a place with 1000+people using Jira. No one complains about the performance. There’s really nothing here I can make a case to the managers about. It does look nice but thats not enough. I think there’s room for an opinionated issue tracker, Jira is like everything and the kitchen sink and people make their own rules.

erichurkman 6y ago
There are already a number of opinionated issue trackers, like Clubhouse and Pivotal Tracker.
- ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
  Yeah you’re right. Well then there’s no more room for issue trackers. Definitely not at the higher levels

iamjaredwalters 6y ago

I've been interested in using Linear but I don't understand the workflow. Do branches have to use the linear issue slug, for example? Is that the keystone of the workflow? I've looked all over for examples of usage to no avail and the Linear website mentions nothing in the way of docs or onboarding.

whichquestion 6y ago

I found the app to be gorgeous and well designed. Very smooth. I would go as far as considering this over JIRA. Only thing I’m not really keen on is the sign in with the google account. I’d rather pay to have an account than have to sign up with google. Sign in with regular email doesn’t really work either, because it never gives you a way to create a password, it just sends a code to your email. If I want to login from a different computer with same email, I can’t unless I sign in with a google account.

voz_ 6y ago

One of the founders of this thing was my first EM at Uber. He was (and is) a very strong engineer, and a great overall guy. Huge kudos, and I wish him the best success. If you wanna put your money in a company started by decidedly not-scumbags, this is the place.

ing33k 6y ago

I just signed up and started using it. Cannot really give a review about it,but the UI is really good. Would like to know the tech stack behind it.

tomaskafka 6y ago

App? Okay ... wait, does that mean no tabs (= instantly accessible working set)? Nononononono! :)

gorgoiler 6y ago

It’s good to see the command palette pattern gain adoption. I’ve introduced a few people now to command-space in macOS and they’ve all loved it. Why hunt for an icon when you can just type “TextEdit”? Maybe a future macOS will allow apps to hook into the spotlight search bar and present their command palettes there, in a standard way?

stunt 6y ago

Atlassian seems to be one of the slowest software companies. They haven't done much to improve their products in all these years. Everything they have is ready to be overtaken by a disruptive product.

cutemonster 6y ago
Assuming you're correct, I wonder what caused A to slowly change and become slow like that? From previously having been a bit innovative? E.g. the many seconds long load times sounds very unexpected ... How did A change so it now accepts things like that? (Or was it always so -- but we were using Jira 5-6 years ago, don't remember having thought of it as slow)

stunt 6y ago

I saw many successful examples of teams with super simple boards. Most of them only with built-in Gitlab/Github issue trackers. When the tooling provides too many options, you will start adding complexity to your workflow without considering real benefits.

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neop1x 6y ago

Product name Linear doesn't seem to be the best choice to me. Google search (correctly) gives linear algebra results.

thinkmassive 6y ago

Wow, multiple mentions of open source in the comments, even a mention of Trac, but no mentions of Phabricator yet? It's the most modern and effective open source issue tracker I've seen so far, definitely worth a look if you value FOSS. https://www.phacility.com/ https://www.phacility.com/

k_bx 6y ago

I'd like to mention one less orthodox solution to a problem of managing issues: a little tool called github-agent I wrote https://github.com/k-bx/github-agent https://github.com/k-bx/github-agent It lets you sync your issues as a git directory of markdown files which you can edit with your favorite Emacs/Vim/Whatever editor. This way it's possible to not get yourself into a "tracker hell", having big and very verbose issues with checklists in them. There are many possible improvements to the tool, it's pretty much MVP and PRs are welcome, but it's already been an amazing helper, esp for my teams that work remotely.

smcleod 6y ago

Just seems to load an empty blank black page in Safari on iOS 13.5.1.

jbaber 6y ago

Still alpha, but I've been enjoying [git-bug](https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug).

pandesal 6y ago

Wow. What a very diverse set of founders

einpoklum 6y ago

It may be fast, but it's not free software. Too bad. ... also, the UI seems to be a lot of white-space and faded colors. That's another negative sign for me.